Malaga, Spain. The chair of the European parliament’s justice and home affairs committee raised the prospect of criminals hiding out in southern Europe with no risk of extradition.
Photograph: Alamy

The days when criminals could hide out in sunny southern European climes with no risk of extradition could return after Brexit, a leading MEP has said, as it emerged that Theresa May’s plan for an unprecedented security deal with the EU is facing a backlash in Brussels.

Claude Moraes, the British Labour MEP who chairs the European parliament’s justice and home affairs committee, raised the prospect of criminals hiding on the Costa del Crime because of difficulties and delays in agreeing a post-Brexit extradition treaty with the EU.

“It is not just that we go back to the bad old days of months of delays, which is bad enough, but as a third [non-EU] country we could face even more restrictions,” Moraes said. The government had made an “extraordinary” lack of progress in negotiations on a security treaty, he added.

Camino Mortera-Martinez, a specialist on EU home affairs at the Centre for European Reform, said the UK risked going over a cliff edge on aspects of EU police cooperation, including the European arrest warrant, crime-fighting databases and membership of the EU police agency, Europol.

It would be impossible to replicate the European arrest warrant outside the EU, Mortera-Martinez said, although she thought the UK could get an extradition treaty similar to that signed by the EU with Norway and Iceland, which took 13 years to negotiate and has “shortcomings”.

In the absence of an extradition deal, the UK can fall back on the 1957 treaty signed under the Council of Europe, the non-EU human-rights organisation. But extraditions done outside the European arrest warrant are four times more costly for the government and can takemonths of legal wrangling.

More than 1,000 fugitives have been extradited to the UK. One recent case resulted in the arrest of one of the UK’s most wanted men, Jamie Acourt, who was detained in Barcelona last Friday by officers investigating drug dealing.

The UK has handed over 10,000 suspected criminals to other EU countries since 2004 – a figure noted by the prime minister as she called on the EU to forgo “doctrine and ideology” and strike a wide-ranging security treaty. British officials say the Brexit implementation period allows enough time to avoid a cliff-edge withdrawal.

Extradition is only one part of the UK government’s plan for a bespoke treaty on security, which would largely preserve the status quo, as a set of government slides published on Wednesday revealed. “There are no insurmountable legal barriers to our proposal,” states the document, which spells out government hopes of staying in Europol and a host of pan-European crime-fighting databases including the Schengen Information System, which British police are said to use every day.

But Brussels sources insist that the UK cannot enjoy the same access to EU police organisations and databases without being a member state, including taking on EU data-protection rules and accepting the remit of the European court of justice.

Some European diplomats were surprised by the ambition of the UK request on police and crime cooperation, after British officials presented their plans in Brussels last week.

Eyebrows were raised after the UK requested to remain part of the Prüm agreement, which allows sharing of fingerprints, DNA and vehicle registration data. The UK only signed the convention in 2016, after declining to take part in earlier years.

As an EU member state, the UK has pioneered an elaborate system allowing it to opt into 40 policy areas but stay out of dozens of others seen as too integrationist, such as a European public prosecutor.

Officials say the UK cannot recreate the system of opt-ins once they have taken the ultimate opt-out, Brexit. “[The British] are saying ‘we had a perfect relationship when we could opt into the things we liked and opt out of the things we didn’t like’,” said one senior EU source. “We are saying Brexit means Brexit. Some of the instruments go with the legal requirements that member states have.”

Although Denmark and the EU came up with a way to share data, the Nordic country has no voting rights at the EU police agency.

Moraes, who helped negotiate the deal, said Danish Eurosceptics were upset about being excluded from decision-making. “There is so much bitterness and they are actually in the European Union.”

David Davis, the UK’s Brexit secretary, said Britain wanted to continue to make a significant contribution to European security after leaving the EU.

“Our negotiating partners have a choice,” he said. “They can treat us as a third country according to existing precedents, creating something that falls well short of our existing relationship, or they can take a more adaptable approach in which we jointly deliver the operational capability that we need to tackle the ever-evolving threats to our shared security.”